There is an interesting 2019 academic paper out of CU Boulder, on the topic of spoofing 4G WEA alerts. I wouldn't recommend doing this, but it's very interesting to understand the technical aspects of WEA, CMAS, and other non-standard mobile comms channels that are involved.
"This is Your President Speaking: Spoofing Alerts in 4G LTE Networks"
Crazy that theres no cryptographic authentication. I get the whole point is rapidly informing, but there should still be some trivial barrier to sending out an alert
A surprising amount of important systems work because nobody can he bothered to mess with them. I think the takeaway is that most people are good, but perhaps also a bit lazy.
Cryptographic authentication means somebody needs to require a set of trusted keys (or a PKI or similar), and I could imagine that during an actual emergency, availability might be a higher priority than non-spoofability.
At least Canada still has 3G. I had my phone set to “downgrade” itself to 3G overnight so I can sleep soundly through amber alerts and nuclear incineration.
Canada sends our amber alerts at the “presidential” level.
I think Ontario tightened up its criteria for these alerts. Haven’t gotten one in a while.
They were mostly joint custody disputes where it’s highly debatable anyone was in danger.
There was the one where the father already murdered the kids at home. Police could legally light up 11m phones but couldn’t legally kick down his door.
I am very surprised to find out that people are still unaware that this is happening, I had to mention it to my partner this morning who had no idea (or forgot) since he mentioned having a call 10 minutes after it was supposed to happen.
This seemed like one of those things that has been communicated extremely well? Or am I being shocked by being in the tech bubble once again?
Also I just don't get all the conspiracy theories about this. I mean how long has Amber alerts existed? Or whether emergency alerts existed? This really isn't that much different but is just national instead of more locally based. As long as it isn't abused I feel like this is a good thing to have in place.
One of those, well hope we never need to use it but if/when it becomes a necessity we will be glad it exists.
I think you live in a bubble. I live in the same bubble, but other than this post, the only other notice I got was from my kid's elementary school. I haven't seen any other news or posts about it.
There should be a government RSS feed of things that are actually news and of import to every member of society. There shouldn’t be more than 3-6 messages on it per year.
For what it's worth I'd consider myself to be a moderately above-average news reader (Reuters and WSJ most days with misc other sources irregularly), and the first I've heard of this is just now
The driver I had from the airport mentioned this last night and I didn't immediately know what he was talking about. Then I vaguely remembered having previously heard something.
I watch the news daily, and am active on social media (including following some government agencies and politicians), I only heard about this from a friend of mine who is deep into conspiracy theories. That was the only time I heard about it until now when it made it to the front page on HN (which is also the first time I see it on social media).
Whichever publicity they did, didn’t reach me at least.
Yeah all the conspiracy people are going nuts about it.
I have a family member thought an amber alert like system being introduced to the uk would bug her smartphone... my response "why would they need to, you already have the smartphone lol"
> When your iPhone is connected to a carrier in the United States—using a U.S. SIM or while roaming in the U.S.—you can enable Test Emergency Alerts. By default, this is turned off.
> Turn Government Alerts on or off
Seems like test alerts are turned off by default and real alerts can be turned off for iOS?
Although this is a test, it is not being sent as a test. It is being sent as a Presidential Alert, which cannot be disabled on any phone running stock firmware. It's literally illegal to sell a phone that allows Presidential Alerts to be disabled.
I really hope to see someone trace and deconstruct the level of bizarre conspiracy theory generation around this event.
For those not aware, I've seen (mostly through semi-related posts on e.g. Reddit) a lot of people forwarding and subscribing to all kinds of absolute nonsense ideas about this event "broadcasting a signal to activate the Marburg virus" or "being particularly painful for the vaccinated to hear", or "likely to start many small fires in modern devices".
I bet that kind of stuff goes around about lots of events -- but I am curious if this one has become so popularly expected to result in bizarre catastrophes just because it's national? Or are people just _much_ more gullible this year?
I was joking with my middle school aged son about this. They have a phones off policy at his school and my guess is a lot of kids are going to get phones confiscated at 12:30 MST.
I saw this one too, and it's an interesting point to consider. I would imagine those people's phones would mostly already be usually concealed, because e.g. an amber or a weather alert with similar effects and consequences could come in at any time.
Those aren't even that far-reaching theories... Apparently, Russia also did a test for this same exact thing today, so you can image the parallels that drew from a select few communities.
So much current conspiracy stuff is so wild that it's essentially impossible to distinguish conspiracy theories that people deeply believe in from sarcasm and for the lulz postings.
Also weird, it's the same people who complaining a pizza shop has a secret underground child prison that are upset by actual attempts to quickly save children.
It's not clear to me how they assert the success of their test from reading. If some large percentage, say a percent, didn't get the alert would they know? Didn't see anything on IPAWS from a quick search, but maybe someone here knows? Are there read-receipts for these alerts?
The process of sending an alert like this is very likely to have numerous steps in the process, with the actual alert delivery being only the final one. This kind of alert would involve multiple agencies, communication channels, coordination, approvals, etc., all before the actual alert goes out. A test like this is designed to make sure all of those things are working.
And yes, there’s definitely a log somewhere showing if delivery was successful, and collecting and analyzing that information after the alert is also probably part of the testing.
Readit News
"This is Your President Speaking: Spoofing Alerts in 4G LTE Networks"
[PDF] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3307334.3326082
* https://www.alertready.ca/testing-schedule/
Canada sends our amber alerts at the “presidential” level.
I think Ontario tightened up its criteria for these alerts. Haven’t gotten one in a while.
They were mostly joint custody disputes where it’s highly debatable anyone was in danger.
There was the one where the father already murdered the kids at home. Police could legally light up 11m phones but couldn’t legally kick down his door.
This seemed like one of those things that has been communicated extremely well? Or am I being shocked by being in the tech bubble once again?
Also I just don't get all the conspiracy theories about this. I mean how long has Amber alerts existed? Or whether emergency alerts existed? This really isn't that much different but is just national instead of more locally based. As long as it isn't abused I feel like this is a good thing to have in place.
One of those, well hope we never need to use it but if/when it becomes a necessity we will be glad it exists.
Whichever publicity they did, didn’t reach me at least.
I have a family member thought an amber alert like system being introduced to the uk would bug her smartphone... my response "why would they need to, you already have the smartphone lol"
> When your iPhone is connected to a carrier in the United States—using a U.S. SIM or while roaming in the U.S.—you can enable Test Emergency Alerts. By default, this is turned off.
> Turn Government Alerts on or off
Seems like test alerts are turned off by default and real alerts can be turned off for iOS?
I think visibility of this setting used to be tied to the phone's configured region, but the new behavior makes more sense for inbound roaming users.
For those not aware, I've seen (mostly through semi-related posts on e.g. Reddit) a lot of people forwarding and subscribing to all kinds of absolute nonsense ideas about this event "broadcasting a signal to activate the Marburg virus" or "being particularly painful for the vaccinated to hear", or "likely to start many small fires in modern devices".
I bet that kind of stuff goes around about lots of events -- but I am curious if this one has become so popularly expected to result in bizarre catastrophes just because it's national? Or are people just _much_ more gullible this year?
'Attention - remain calm': Russia tests public warning system (https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-conduct-emergenc...)
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
And yes, there’s definitely a log somewhere showing if delivery was successful, and collecting and analyzing that information after the alert is also probably part of the testing.
Then I would also assume that part of the system would report back saying "delivered" and they could just compare those numbers?